


Overcome

by very



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Blood, First Aid, Gen, Pre-Game(s), Training Center, Video Game Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-04 00:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/very/pseuds/very
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seifer goes to meet up with Squall in the Training Center, and finds a trail of blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Overcome

He’s late.

The Training Centre is unusually quiet; corpses of grats are set neatly to the side of the walking path in uneven intervals. Definitely Squall’s work, Seifer can tell: the brutality of the slashmarks bisecting the corpses could only be made with a gunblade, and he can detect the faint scent of Squall’s favoured Valentin flake gunpowder lingering in the air.

Seifer moves steadily, surely, blade at rest on his shoulder. This number of fresh bodies is almost guaranteed to put fear into the grats’ tiny little bestial brains, and they have a tendency to pack when frightened. He’s not scared of a couple of grats, or even half a dozen, but if a few larger packs should come across him he’ll have to resort to hoping he can summon Alexander fast enough.

In the narrow pass by the section C bridge the stench of death is heavy upon the air; the sour-sap stench of grat ichor is so overwhelming that he can almost taste it on his tongue.

Bodies are strewn haphazardly across the path, not just marked by a gunblade but some torn in gruesome, bloody halves by something a lot bigger and a lot stronger than Squall. He counts fourteen corpses in this tiny space before his gaze is caught by the sparkle of the artificial lighting reflecting off a piece of metal on the ground.

A distinctive lion’s head fob lays on the ground with a link and a half still attached, gleaming in the middle of a pool of blood the size of a dinner plate.

Adrenaline floods through him, refines his focus, keens his senses.

He spots an uneven spatter of blood trailing away from the carnage, weaving from side to side in patternless disarray.

Almost without thinking he picks up the charm, heedless of the blood that smears on his fingers and palm. Thumb tracing the engraving, he follows the trail as it wends its uneven way towards the nearest restroom, each stumble and faltering moment retold by the grouping of droplets, smears and bloody footsteps.

The card-lock at restroom C-2 is smeared with blood but more alarming is the gunblade that lies discarded on the ground, dirt sticking to the spatters of red human blood and sickly green grat ichor. The chain on the handle lies fobless, the last link stretched open and gaping. Collecting the gunblade, he swipes his ID card through the lock, his hand pushing on the door inches above the crimson streak that is surely Squall’s handprint.

Ragged breathing greets him as he enters the tiled room, followed by the sound of dry, fruitless retching. Turning the corner out of the vestibule, he sees Squall bent over the vanity, propping himself up with one trembling arm while he reaches tentatively forward towards the mirror, grasping at the invisible.

Squall’s back is a gory sight: his formerly white shirt is soaked almost completely red, and hangs tattered and gaping.

“Squall,” he drawls. “Forget something?” He leans the gunblade against the counter.

It warms him with a sense of gratification to see Squall turn and face him, but the sight of Squall’s face chills the blood in his veins. Squall’s complexion is past pale, past sallow and is teetering on green. Twin lines of blood trail from his nose, though the flow seems to have abated. But it’s Squall’s eyes that worry him most: glassy and watering, he can tell even from here that they’re not focusing, and the left one is blown, dilated so wide that he sees only the slimmest ring of skypale grey.

“Won’dring when you’d show up,” Squall slurs, turning back to spit in the sink to clear his mouth.

“Fashionably late, as always,” Seifer replies airily. “You look like shit. I don’t have an Antidote or I’d offer, but I can spare you a Potion in the meantime,” he says, pulling a slender vial of blue liquid from Alexander’s GF-space with a flourish.

Squall reaches for the proffered vial and misses by a laughable amount; his depth perception is clearly shot. Rather than offer again, Seifer simply uncorks the cap and steps forward. He places his hand under Squall’s chin and tilts his head back so he can pour the contents of the vial directly down Squall’s throat, getting an annoyed look and a recoil for his efforts.

Seifer tosses the empty tube in the nearest trash bin as Squall licks a blue smear of Potion from the corner of his mouth. “We’ve got to clear that poison, but that should help the blood loss,” Seifer says. We’ll take a look at your back in a sec. Do you have any Antidotes?” he asks.

Squall nods, reaching forward hesitantly. Seifer almost thinks Squall’s reaching out for him before he notices the brief flickers of icepale blue ringing Squall’s irises that telegraph his attempts to reach into Shiva’s GF-space.

“Can’t concentrate,” Squall says, catching a cough in the crook of his elbow. It’s wet, but since his breathing is dry Seifer isn’t overly concerned.

Seifer can almost see the vitality fading from him. “Give me your hand,” he says, reaching out to take it so that Squall has no option to demur. Entwining their fingers, he closes his eyes for concentration. “I’m going to push,” Seifer warns. “Let me in, okay?”

Squall says nothing, and Seifer is not surprised to find Squall’s mind stolidly closed to him. He waits until Squall shudders at the next pulse of the poison running through his veins, then lightly glides his thumb over the palm of Squall’s hand as a distraction. He reaches out, pushes, touching as lightly as he can so that he doesn’t take Squall’s poison-keened pain inside of himself.

Seifer can still sense the underlying order to Squall’s GF-space. Squall has no Esuna drawn, of course, no cadet is going to have access to that, but it takes Seifer only a second to find and pluck one of Squall’s half-dozen vials of Antidote and draw it into real-space.

Squall lurches forward as Seifer withdraws his mind, and squeezes Seifer’s hand with reflexive strength. “Gimme a sec,” Squall says, pulling free of Seifer’s grip to whirl around and heave into the sink, nothing coming up save the sound of retching. Squall spits into the sink, then extends an empty hand towards him wordlessly. Seifer hands him the Antidote, their fingertips brushing together. Squall uncorks the vial and drinks down the contents in a single swallow. Almost immediately the grotesque pallor fades from his skin. Eyes lowered, still facing the mirror, Squall mutters “Thank you”, an absolute rarity.

Seifer can’t help the grin that curves his lips, but does manage to swallow down the piercing retort that wells up in him—an act of remarkable self-control, if he says so himself. But Squall’s genuine gratitude is rare coin indeed, and giving Squall shit over it would squander it. Instead he merely watches as Squall eyes himself in the mirror before he turns on the tap, soaping up and rinsing his hands before moving on to clean up his face.

“Kadowaki’s next, eh?” Seifer asks. He doesn’t offer to accompany him, knowing that overture would be rejected out of hand, but he knows that if he simply walks with him Squall won’t dismiss him. Squall looks a hell of a lot better than he did a minute ago, but there was still a rather shocking amount of blood spilled between where Seifer found the lion charm and where he found Squall.

“Hm,” Squall says non-committally, drying his hands off on a sheet of paper towel. His eyeliner’s smudged a bit, making his stormy irises seem even paler. “Not necessary,” he says, pulling his ruined shirt up over his head and tossing it into the trash.

“Hyne afire on the pyre,” Seifer swears, raking his eyes across Squall’s back. His skin is shredded, not only criss-crossed with the distinctive poisoned lashings of grats, but a rake of what absolutely has to be T-Rexaur claws. A small one, a baby, but fearsome nonetheless.

His tone is light, arch. “Playing with dinosaurs, Squall? They call me brash, and here you are messing around with the SeeDs’ toys.”

Squall snorts. “It was attracted by the ruckus.”

“Didn’t see a body. What happened?” he asks, watching fresh blood ooze from the numerous cuts as the landscape of Squall’s back shifts as he washes his hands again.

“Slept it and ran like hell,” Squall says, a rare half-smile reflected in the mirror. “I take it that it wasn’t traipsing around when you got there.”

“No sign of it,” Seifer says. Then, reconsidering, “Ah, perhaps there was. The corpses were rather well worked-over, from what I saw. I’m surprised it didn’t come after you; you left a trail a blind man could follow.”

“I left it plenty to eat,” Squall mutters. “Have a Cure on you? I used my last.”

“You Cure those before you clean the wounds and you’ll scar,” Seifer warns. “You wanna tell the whole world for the rest of your life that you got your ass kicked by a grat?”

Squall doesn’t bother to turn around, but does look directly in Seifer’s direction through the mirror. “I’m not an idiot,” he says shortly, reaching over to grab some more paper towel from the dispenser. He turns on the faucet, soaking the paper sheet, and as Seifer realises what Squall plans to do he snorts.

“Oh, for Hyne’s sake, don’t be so fucking pathetic. Give me that,” he says, not waiting for the sheet to be proffered before snatching it out of Squall’s hands and throwing it in the trash. “That’s going to rub like hell. Give me a sec,” he says, shrugging his coat off and hanging it up on the nearby hook. He pulls his shirt over his head, followed by his undershirt. Squall stares at him, uncomprehending. Seifer hangs his button-down shirt on the hook next to his coat, he heads to the sink on Squall’s left and begins to saturate his undershirt in warm water, rinsing and wringing it.

“If I ever need you to patch me up, I want you to know that I will tear the earring from your earlobe if you even think about scratching paper towels against wounds even remotely as bad as these,” he warns, stepping behind Squall with wet cloth in hand.

“I’d like to see you try,” Squall says, closing his eyes and reaffirming his grip on the edge of the counter as Seifer begins at the top of his back, gently mopping up the congealing blood.

Squall isn’t broadly built but he is tightly muscled. While he has commanded his breathing to be slow and even, he has not mastered himself over the quick twitches that betray his discomfort when Seifer brushes against a wound.

Seifer gets about halfway down Squall’s back before he figures he’s hit saturation point with the shirt and needs to rinse. He reaches around Squall to use the sink they’re standing at, and notices Squall’s reflection in the mirror opening his eyes to watch him.

When the shirt is as wrung-out as it can be he resumes his work, watching Squall’s eyes slide closed.

Seifer takes his time with the rest. There’s a particularly abused spot just above a kidney where one of the T-Rexaur talons ripped across three distinct grat lashes; Squall sucks in an anguished breath as Seifer attempts to be gentle.

Seifer finds himself watching Squall’s face in the mirror instead of the work of his hands; he finds that looking for those minute, involuntary twitches in the corner of his closed eyes is a better way to assess what he’s doing. He sets one hand on the counter so he can lean in for a more convenient angle; this close to Squall he can smell past the bitter tang of blood so heavy in the air and detect the saltiness of his sweat, the ocean scent of his deodorant, the citrus of his shampoo.

He’s paused for seconds too long; Squall opens his eyes and immediately locks gazes with him through their reflections in the mirror. Squall’s irises are so pale, stormblue shot with silver, that the smudges of black eyeliner and the purple of the bags under his eyes are a startling darkness that casts a shadow over his whole countenance. His lips are chapped and cracked, and as Seifer watches, Squall runs his tongue across his bottom lip to restore some moisture to them.

Before Squall can say anything, Seifer tosses the sodden rag haphazardly at the bin to free his right hand, then places his palm flat against the middle of Squall’s back. Squall sucks in a hiss at the sting, lowering his head and looking away in a sharp, reflexive movement.

“Cure,” Seifer calls as the magic flows through him, manifesting in glittering blue sparks. Squall’s back repairs itself as he watches, skin sealing up without a trace of scar or defect.

Seifer claps a startled Squall abruptly on the shoulder. “You’ll live,” he drawls, stepping back.

Squall turns around, tossing him an annoyed look before giving his back to the mirror and leaning over his shoulder to inspect Seifer’s handiwork.

“Cleanly done,” Squall acknowledges.

“I said, didn’t I?” Seifer points out. “Here.” He tosses Squall his button-down shirt.

Squall quirks an eyebrow as he catches the garment.

“Unless you brought a change of clothing with you, that’s your only option,” Seifer says. “Would you prefer to go about shirtless?”

Squall snorts and shrugs into the shirt. “I’ll get it back to you after next laundry call,” he says.

“Whenever it should suit you,” he agrees benevolently, removing his coat from the hook and shrugging it on, fastening it closed to mask his shirtlessness. “I suppose our little contest should also wait.”

Squall’s expression immediately flattens. “Don’t back out on me.”

“So eager to get your ass kicked, are you? But you’ve painted the floor with almost a litre of blood, I’m sure, and caused considerable distress to the local wildlife. I don’t feel like being T-Rexaur dinner,” he points out, eminently reasonable.

Squall doesn’t bother with the top couple of buttons on the shirt and Seifer can see the glint of silver from the pendant he wears. Reminded, he pulls the bloody lion’s head out of GF-space and offers it to Squall. “Lost this,” he says, dangling it between two fingers and letting it spin idly.

Squall accepts it with a nod, disappearing the fob into GF-space seconds after he touches it. He takes the gunblade from where it rests against the sink and does the same with it, then returns his attention to Seifer with a challenging tilt of his head. “Tomorrow, then,” he says.

Seifer’s eyes narrow as his mouth curves into a slow grin. “Tomorrow.”


End file.
